Maciek Romanowicz (05/01/2023)

Hi All,

Looking forward to hearing feedback from you or engage in a conversation on any of the topics below.

What I recently found interesting:

• Economics of Professional Tennis Described by PTPA

  • To this day when asked “tell me your story” whether it be in social or professional settings when I get to my parting with the tennis dream of winning Wimbledon I say:

    • “After Junior year at Stanford I realized that I needed to be realistic about my tennis potential and estimated that, if I decided to play on tour for at least 5 years post-college, I would confidently reach top 600 in singles and top 200 in doubles, with an unknown (my estimate was 10% & 30%, respectively) probability to make top 200 in singles and top 50 in doubles

  • As you can see in the PTPA presentation, 80% of top 1000 singles players (for both ATP & WTA) make less in prize money than the costs they incur to compete (e.g. flights, accommodation, coaches, tennis equipment, practice courts etc.)

  • Separately, I had a wonderful upbringing and my parents made every effort to provide me with opportunities to pursue my passion; that said, I was also taught to be responsible when spending money, which I can attribute to my parents growing up in communist Poland when they frequently experienced empty shelves in stores and therefore had been raised to save money and goods rather than indulge and consume; building on that, when faced with the decision to go pro or not in tennis I was unable to come to agreement with my own soul to ask my parents to spend $100-200k annually on my tennis dream post-college without a line of sight of ever bringing that money back to them

  • Add those three thoughts together and you can deduce why I made a decision to let tennis go, even though I had (and still have) an utmost passion for the game (and playing / coaching sports in general)

  • Circling back to PTPA and why its mission matters to me; it was founded in 2020 as a non-profit organization to advocate for tennis professionals across the world; two years later it launched its for-profit arm called Winners Alliance to create revenue-generating opportunities for tennis players and democratize access to pursuing the professional tennis dream, which is why their recent acceleration of efforts is so close to my heart

    • To highlight the opportunity that PTPA is looking to exploit, a few worthwhile stats are:

      • Tennis is the 4th most popular sports in the world (behind soccer, basketball and cricket)

      • Its global revenue across all associations (Grand Slams, ATP / WTA, ITF etc.) is less than $2.5B which is a drop in the ocean when benchmarked against the likes of NFL (~$17.5B) and Premier League ($6.8B); please note that Premier League is just one soccer league with every other country having its own equivalent

      • Tennis players take home only 17.5% of all global tennis revenue, as compared to 22.6% for golf and 45%+ for team sports

• Interesting stats illustrating the growth of professional women’s sports popularity → why does that matter?

  • While the introduction of Title IX in 1972 initiated the growth trend of women’s participation in sports in the US, there is still a lot of work to do to elevate women’s sports, especially on the professional side

    • it is important because there have been multiple studies done which highlighted the correlation between participation in youth sports and managerial positions held at work later in life

  • Needless to say, I believe that one of the main ways to close the gender equity gap in all aspects of life is thru creating (as well as encouraging and promoting) more opportunities for women to play sports as kids, teens and professionals.

• Bill Gates shares his views on AI

  • In addition to his understanding of AI, its potential, current flaws as well as the risks associated with it, Bill Gates highlights how AI can help reduce the world’s inequities

  • An example that I liked the most covers education, which is directly tied to future opportunities available to people

    • Personally, I am a big believer in customized coaching (i.e. there is never a ‘one size fits all’ solution) and my own view is that AI has the real potential to revolutionize education by catering to each student’s unique needs in an affordable way (i.e. more or less replace the costly tutors available to very few people nowadays)

Miscellaneous

• Personal

  • For the first time in 6 months I have spent a full month in NY, testing new startup ideas, soliciting advice from people specializing in a variety of fields, exploring potential job opportunities and reigniting my passion for coaching tennis.

• Song Recommendation

  • “Heroes” by David Bowie -> it caught my attention for two reasons:

    • it is very positive and gives a vibe of “nothing is impossible”

    • it empowers us to be who we are and who we want to be, not who we should be and not who others want us to be